John wrote to show that Christ was
the Messiah, the Divine Son of God.

If
you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and
he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth,
which the world cannot accept, because it neither sees nor knows it. But
you know it, because it remains with you, and will be in you. I will not
leave you orphans; I will come to you. In a little while the world will no
longer see me, but you will see me, because I live and you will live. On
that day you will realize that I am in my Father and you are in me and I in you.
Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. And
whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal
myself to him."

One
of the most spiritual destructive ideas that has infected the world is the
fallacy of claiming to love Jesus Christ while at the same time ignoring and
even rejecting the commandments and the teachings of the Church. This is
like professing to love another person's voice but to hate his words. It
is a superficial outlook. The real test and testimony of our love for
another lies in our acceptance of what the one we love holds dear.
Authentic love means cherishing and honoring what the one we love cherishes and
honors, so long as it contributes to our true good.

"If
you love me, you will keep my commandments," Jesus tells us in this week's
Gospel passage. This is not an ultimatum but a simple statement of fact;
anyone who truly loves Jesus will obey the Eternal Law because of the way that
the Law of God enables us to make the love of God real in our lives. The
Lord's commandments - in particular, the Ten Commandments - are a gift from God
by which we can measure what we love most in life. For the sad reality is
that human beings love sin. We hesitate to give up sin because we doubt we
can find anything else that gratifies us as much as we think sin does.

The
commandments of the Lord make it clear how much, left to ourselves, we would
fall in love with idolatry, impiety, disobedience, violence, sensuality,
stealing, dishonest and covetousness. Thus, we need the commandments in
order to purify our love for Jesus. As our late Holy Father, Pope John
Paul II once wrote, the Ten Commandments "save man from the destructive force of
egoism, hatred and falsehood. They point out all the false gods that can
draw him into slavery." The commandments provide us with a way to assess
whether we are living for ourselves or living in and for Christ Jesus.
Keeping the commandments frees us from the too-often empty and illusory promises
of a secularized world that has lost sight of the vocation to which all human
beings are called: life forever in the presence of the Father, Son and Holy
Spirit.

In
this light, we can begin to see that the commandments are not something imposed
on us from the outside. Rather, the commandments illuminate the truth
about ourselves: that we are invited, by God Himself, to a loving surrender to
the Father through Christ Jesus in the Holy Spirit. That is why Jesus
promises, in our Gospel passage, that "I will not leave you orphans." He
promises to send "another Advocate, to be with you always." The Person of
the Holy Spirit is with us always to empower us to love and to fulfill the
personal law of God. The Holy Spirit comes and remains with us in order to
engender within us a filial trust in the Lord and the certainty of being loved
by Him. Then, filled with the light of truth, we can embrace and live the
Gospel freedom that comes to us through the blessing of the Lord's commandments:
the freedom to love, the freedom to choose what is good in every situation, even
when doing so is difficult. And what results from our observance of His
commandments is the promise of Jesus, "Whoever has my commandments and observes
them is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my
Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him."